"Simon & Simon: Loser Turns Up Winner"

“Simon & Simon: Loser Turns Up Winner,” by Jerry Buck appeared in the May 8, 1983, issue of the Sunday Magazine in the Salt Lake Tribune. Essentially an interview with Simon & Simon (1981 – 89) creator, Philip DeGuere, Jr., it chronicles the series’ early years. My favorite part? Learning it started out life as Pirates Key—set on a mythical island in the Florida Keys.

 

Booked (and Printed): October 2024

 

Ah, my old friend October skated by with hardly saying hello; or so it felt because the entire month passed in a week. A windstorm stripped the trees of their coloring leaves and the nighttime lows plummeted from the 50s to near freezing. Brrr… But my reading—as it always does this time of year—improved over last month with five books, four novels and a story anthology, and three shorts. My first of the month is Gavin Lyall’s splendid aviation thriller, Shooting Script (1966). Lyall’s work is defined by his imaginative plotting, literate style, and Raymond Chandler-esque dialogue. And Shooting Script, which is Lyall’s fourth published novel, is amongst his best. Keith Carr—a Korean War RAF fighter pilot—operates a struggling one plane Caribbean air cargo service. After Carr is gray-listed by the U.S. Government for false rumors he is flying supplies to revolutionaries in the fictional Republic Libra, he is forced to take a gig flying a camera plane for an American movie crew filming in Jamaica. But as one would suspect there is more going on than meets the eye. There are echoes of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, a bigger-than-life actor with a resemblance to John Wayne, right-wing politics and all, and a creative use for a rusting old B-25 bomber. Shooting Script is about as good as a mid-century thriller gets. Chuck Dixon’s vigilante tale, Levon’s Trade (2012), came next. I’d heard good things about Levon’s Trade and its eleven sequels. It is well-written and entertaining, but there’s not much original here. It’s the same book that has been written over and over since Don Pendleton introduced The Executioner in 1969, but if you like this stuff, you can do a lot worse than Levon’s Trade. Eight Very Bad Nights, edited by Tod Goldberg (2024), is a solidly entertaining anthology featuring eleven new crime and thriller stories set during the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. In a phrase, it’s good fun—check my detailed review here. There was a time when I read horror; a lot of horror. And one of my favorite writers from that long ago era is Jack Ketchum. His most popular work tends to be gross-out, ultra-violent slasher stuff; e.g. Off Season (1980), Offspring (1991). But categorizing Ketchum’s writing, even at its most depraved, with the norm in the slasher and splatter-punk subgenres is like comparing a BMW with a Yugo. Ketchum wrote with vigor and style. His tales unfailingly revealed something about humanity; even if that revelation is uncomfortable. So for Halloween this season I reread Ketchum’s 1984 novel, Hide and Seek. I originally read it twenty years ago and I had forgotten almost everything except the climactic sequence and its Maine setting. It’s a demented haunted house tale about five kids playing a game of hide and seek in an abandoned house. It’s damn good, too, but only if you like horror and don’t mind a bit of graphic violence. Penance (1996) is David Housewright’s first novel. You’ve likely noticed—if you read the blog regularly—I’m a fan of Housewright’s Rushmore McKenzie mysteries. But Penance features a former St. Paul, Minnesota cop turned P.I. named Holland Taylor. It’s obviously a first novel. The voice isn’t as strong as Housewright’s subsequent books and the plot is overly complicated. But it’s fun watching Taylor spin around a murder investigation that takes him all the way to the State House. And Penance really is good (just not as good as Housewright has become in the decades since).

The number of short stories I read in October dropped from the previous month, but two of the three were novellas. The first is Ed Gorman’s post-apocalyptic, “Survival” (1995). A novella that was originally published in Gorman’s collection, Cages, “Survival” is a rare so-so tale from Ed. The idea is cool: Fascist religious terrorists demolish humanity with nuclear weapons and the survivors band together in hospitals where they are treated, without medicine, for the after-effects of the blasts. The plotting is a bit confusing, but the premise and characters are interesting enough to make it worthwhile. “Dracula Wine,” by David Housewright (2021)—the 22nd installment of the multi-author A Grifter’s Song series—is a satisfying caper about a con-woman taking a businessman to the cleaners. It’s good fun with a smooth twist. Jeremiah Healy’s “Battered Spouse” (1990) is my favorite of Healy’s John Francis Cuddy shorts. Cuddy is called in when a jogger is killed by a hit-and-run driver to drum up something the police may have missed, which he does, of course—read my detailed review here. Fin— Now on to next month…

1970s Western Splatterpunk: Six-Gun Samurai & Sloane

 

1970s Western Splatterpunk: Six-Gun Samurai: Bushido Vengeance & Sloane: The Man with the Iron Fists By Mike Baker     I’d finished the relentlessly dark Blood Meridian and then read Cormac McCarthy’s 3rd book, Child of God, which, while entertaining enough for a Cormac McCarthy book, gets progressively more f’d up as Lester Ballard becomes unmoored from his humanity, descending into the hell of his unchecked subconscious. I needed a break—which is why I grabbed Six-Gun Samurai: Bushido Vengeance, which is book #2 in that series by “Patrick Lee”. When Tom Fletcher was a 12-year-old midshipman on duty at the American mission in Tokyo, the mission was attacked by ninjas. Everyone is massacred but Tom who escapes, is taken in, and adopted, by a Samurai who raises Tom as his own son, training him to be a Samurai warrior. When his American family is butchered by renegade Union soldiers, led by notorious Colonel Edward Hollister, Tom heads back to the States to get his revenge. Each book in the series finds him hunting Hollister and his gang of murderous scum. This outing with Tanaka Tom is somehow more insane than the first go. Tom is hunting a man who took part in the murder of his family but is now acting as an Indian agent. The Indian agent is trying to get two rival bands of Apache to slaughter each other so that the Indian Agent can take their land for his boss, and Tom’s nemesis, Colonel Hollister who led the soldiers that murdered Tom’s family. First, Tom befriends one band of Apache and then he convinces the Indian Agent that he’s a bad guy, gets hired by the Indian Agent, gets his cover blown blah blah blah. He then rushes back to the Apaches and gets the two rival bands to unite based on the principles of bushido which they intuitively get as noble savages, and they all go to war against the US Cavalry. There’s a whole court case where Tanaka Tom defends his and the Apache’s slaughter of the US Cavalry which is pretty f’ing boring, but it leads to a climax on par with any spaghetti western/Shaw Brothers extravaganza in its over the top, batshit crazy mass blood and slaughter.     I’m a traditional guy when it comes to westerns. I, myself, started with Piccadilly Cowboy stuff but then migrated to Lewis Patten, Clifton Adams and Elmer Kelton because, and feel free to disagree, I need someone to root for and cheering on Edge or Crow was essentially cheering on all my rage and disappointment which I should have resolved in my 30’s. That said, the book is so bonkers that, the stupid, boring ass court scene aside, its infectious fun and the absolute absurdity of this book convinced me to buy book #3.

Still feeling Cormac McCarthy fatigue, I grabbed Sloane: The Man with the Iron Fists, by “Steven Lee”, and holy smokes, it is actually more ridiculous than Six-Gun Samurai. Sloane’s daddy is a sodbuster and one day a Conestoga wagon carrying a circus troupe, led by a rubber nose wearing clown, stops at the Sloane homestead asking for directions and water and ends up with Sloane’s daddy getting tortured to death as Sloane’s mama is raped, tortured and murdered. Sloane high tails it to the countryside to get away from the horror movie his family home has descended into—let me be clear—this shit is f’d up even by Picadilly standards. And Sloane doesn’t get away because, like most circus troupes, their evil Apache runs him down with a horse and stomps holy hell out of him with the horse and then leaves Sloane for dead. He is, of course, rescued by a Chinese family whose wife is a healer and whose father is a kung fu master which leads to Sloane living and becoming a kung fu master. They have a daughter who Sloane later screws because the 70’s had some real messed up Freudian whatever the hell that made David Hamilton ok for the American book buying public and those creepy Pia Zadora/Brooke Shields underaged movies not seem, at the time, creepy as hell. Sloane grows up and hunts the clown, and his clown posse, down. There’s lots and lots of ultra violence involving kung fu but also guns, acrobatics, knife throwing and yes, clowning.       The only bad thing about the books, other than the story etc., is that there were only two of them to make fun of.